Level Up Your Webinar Design with a Great Slide Deck

A good slide deck will drive your main points home to your audience and keep them engaged throughout your webinar. It could be the difference between having everyone stick around to hear your pitch at the end, and having half of your attendees lose interest and drop off partway through your presentation.

If you're not a designer, it can be hard to know where to start when it comes to creating your slides. That's why we've put together this guide to walk you through the process for designing great slides, and to point out some common mistakes you should watch out for.

How to create an engaging slide deck for your webinar design

Whether you use Powerpoint, Google Slides, Keynote, Canva or some other tool to create your presentation, these principles of good slide design will apply to them all. Let's get into it!

Start with the content

In the best webinars designs, slides play a supporting role to great content and well-planned teaching. So when you're planning your webinar design you should never start with the slides. Make sure you have your content planned out and well structured before you open up a presentation tool.

The job of your slides is to help your audience digest the information you're sharing– so to design them you need to know what that information is first!

A good place to start with this is to create a draft slide deck. This will include:

A title slide

An intro

A slide for each main topic

A pitch at the end

This is the bones of your presentation. You'll then be able to go in and add whatever extra slides you need to elaborate on the main topics.

Remember, the point of a presentation isn't to have every single word you say written on screen. Slides should simply support your main points and introduce new topics or ideas to your audience. They're visual aids to what you're saying.

Pro tip: Overuse of bullet points is the main downfall of many webinars for this very reason. Instead of reading a few words to introduce a concept on screen and then listening intently to what you have to say about it, if you present your audience with a list of bullet points on the topic they will sit there and read them all; only half-listening to you.

If they read ahead and see all six points on your list, when they tune back in to what you're saying and discover you're still covering the first point it can really make a presentation drag for an attendee. You'll keep them better engaged if instead of presenting your points as a bulleted list you instead just talk about them with a relevant title slide or image on screen, or break the points up across several slides.

Not only will this help keep your attendees engaged, you'll be doing them a favor and helping them to better retain the information you're sharing. Many studies have shown that multitasking is a myth. It makes us feel more productive, sure, but we actually get more done when we focus on one thing at a time.

So don't make your audience multitask by reading on screen about one thing while listening to you talk about something else. By all means, summarise your topic at the end with all the main points on one slide if you need to, but this shouldn't be the way you introduce them up front.

You also shouldn’t be tempted to put a lot of words on your slides just because it will make it easier for you to remember your presentation. Slides are for your audience first and foremost.Aaron Weyenber of TED warns against this too:

Too often, I see slide decks that feel more like presenter notes, but I think it’s far more effective when the slides are for the audience to give them a visual experience that adds to the words.

If you need notes to feel confident presenting your webinar, print them out and have them in front of you. Leave your slides with only the essential information in its simplest form.

Create a template

With your slides planned out and drafted, now the fun part can begin: selecting the color palette and fonts that you'll be working with and designing some slides.

It's best to stick to just a couple of complimentary fonts and a limited color palette to make your slide deck feels cohesive and not too overwhelming. A slide deck with smart color palette and font choices feels much more professional and unified than one that goes overboard, and much more interesting than one that sticks with the default black and white.

You might decide to follow the same fonts and colors as your brand for your webinar (and this is a great idea for consistency and building brand recognition!), but you might also decide to give your webinar a brand of its own. If you need help choosing colors and fonts, check out our guide to typography for bloggers, and our introduction to color theory.

When you've settled on fonts and colors, it's a great idea to create a few templates to work with so that you're not designing something brand new for each slide in the deck. I'd suggest starting with a main title slide, a topic slide, a slide for sub points (two different backgrounds for variety), a slide for quotes, and a slide for images. Here's a look at these basic slides in the presentation template I created for ConvertKit.

The point of the template isn't to limit you to only using these layouts– it's to give you a base to start working with so that you can figure out the basics like what font size you'll use for main headings or what your highlight color will be

Create hierarchy and drive points home

Work through your draft slide deck and apply your template as you go, choosing the layout you feel best suits the content for each slide. This is where you can also break away from the template and add design elements that help make each piece of content easy to understand.

For example, some points might really suit having an icon next to them (Noun Project is a great place to find these by the way!), and if you mention a statistic it could help make it more powerful to display the number alongside a graph.

Look out for places you can repeat design elements to be consistent. If you put an icon or an image on one topic title slide, consider adding one to all the rest of them too. Repeated motifs like this will be a visual cue to your audience that you're starting a new topic and they will subconsciously pick up on this as you move through your presentation.

So consistency is great, especially for title slides, but that doesn't mean all the rest of your slides need to look the exact same.

To keep your presentation interesting it's actually a good idea to make sure your slides have some variety (that's why I suggested having two different background colors for your sub point slides). Seeing slide after slide with text in the same font and color on the same background gets boring fast, and it also makes the information harder to understand as there are no visual cues telling your attendee that this is new information.

You can break up slide monotony by using different background colors and different arrangements of information. As a general rule having two backgrounds that are subtly different (like the white and grey used here) is great for mixing up ‘business as usual' slides, with a contrasting background you can use for key information you want to stand out.

You're in control of the main things your audience will remember from your webinar and the phrases and words you emphasise in your slide design will be the ones that stick in their memory. There are several ways you can do this. If you have a long sentence in particular, highlighting certain words will help them to grasp the main takeaway and also make those words more memorable.

You can also use photography to help make your content more emotive, but use it sparingly.

If you have a deck of 50 slides with a new photo on each one, that's a lot of new imagery for your audience to take in! Instead choose a few main points on your presentation where you want to invoke a certain emotion from your audience.

Perhaps a photo of an open country road when you talk about the freedom they'll feel after implementing your advice, or a chaotic scene of a busy street when you talk about the pain points they might be feeling.

Pro tip: keep in mind that you must have the rights to use the images in your presentation. So don't just grab any old image from Google. Instead use a royalty-free stock photography site like Shutterstock or a creative-commons resource like Unsplash.

A great slide deck will improve the quality of your webinar design

As soon as you present a webinar, the quality of your slides becomes part of your brand online and the way your audience perceives you, so treat them with as much care as you would a new page on your website. A well-designed slide deck can make your audience see you as a professional, and put more trust in you.

To help you avoid any slide design faux pas, we've put together this checklist. Run through it once you finish your slide deck and if you answer yes to all of them, you're good to go!

Charli is a designer from New Zealand currently living and loving life in London. She’s passionate about side projects and when she’s not designing at ConvertKit she's running an online store, and creating content for her design-centric YouTube channel and podcast with the aim of helping out young creatives.

Very good, actionable advice! I’ve been doing webinars for a long time and was still able to get value out of this.

Lily N.

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